Sports Roundup by Various Sports Writers

By Tim Sullivan

Now that Mark McGwire has finally agreed to talk about the past, would someone kindly hit the mute button?

I don't want to hear it. Not now. Not 12 years after the fraudulent home run race of 1998. Not five years after Big Mac's pathetic testimony on Capitol Hill. Not this long after a generation of steroid freaks bilked baseball of its traditional slugging standards and rendered its record book ridiculous.

Confession might be good for the soul of the sinner, but it does little for the listener when it serves only to confirm what everyone already assumed.

Except for the fact that he had evaded the issue by laying low instead of insulting our intelligence with implausible fabrications, Mark McGwire admitting to steroid use is not much different than Pete Rose's tardy admission that he bet on baseball.

It's too late and too transparent for full clemency and bears the appearance of an act of career-oriented obligation rather than a voluntary unburdening. McGwire has come clean in conjunction with his comeback as hitting coach of the St. Louis Cardinals, presumably as a condition of that employment (implicit if not explicit).

That doesn't make him a hero, merely a pragmatist.

McGwire had to know that the Cardinals could not bring him back as the unexplained elephant in the clubhouse. He had to know that the steroid questions he had clumsily ducked under oath had not evaporated upon the expiration of the statute of limitations, and that his presence in a St. Louis uniform would have posed a provocative distraction until he had addressed those questions in detail.

He had to take one for the team if he was to be part of a team.

"I was not in a position to do that five years ago in my congressional testimony," McGwire said in his prepared statement, later citing the advice of his attorneys in interviews. "But now I feel an obligation to discuss this and to answer questions about it. I'll do that, and then I just want to help my team."

Mark McGwire has as much right to privacy as anyone else, but he also became a national celebrity and a multimillionaire with the aid of chemical enhancement that is illegal without a doctor's prescription. And though that sort of conduct was common during baseball's see-no-evil era, Commissioner Bud Selig now fancies himself a reformer. As such, he could hardly allow McGwire back in uniform without some public act of contrition.

To wit:

"I'm sure people will wonder if I could have hit all those home runs had I never taken steroids," McGwire said in his statement.

"I had good years when I didn't take any, and I had bad years when I didn't take any. I had good years when I took steroids, and I had bad years when I took steroids. But no matter what, I shouldn't have done it and for that I'm truly sorry."

How much performance-enhancing drugs helped McGwire's hitting is conjecture, but the hypothesis here is that the help was significant. Before McGwire shattered Roger Maris' record with 70 home runs in 1998, no major league hitter had hit more than 61 in a single season. Since the slugging spike culminated with Barry Bonds' 73-homer season in 2001, no big league hitter has hit more than 58 homers in a season.

The hypothesis here is that neither the sudden surge in power numbers nor the return to a normal range was coincidental.

Bonds has been indicted by a federal grand jury for making false statements and obstruction of justice. Alex Rodriguez, on pace to surpass Bonds as the career home run leader, has admitted to steroid shortcuts. With scores of positive drug tests still unreported, no fewer than 10 former Most Valuable Players have been implicated as juicers: Bonds, A-Rod, Ken Caminiti, Jose Canseco, Roger Clemens, Jason Giambi, Juan Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa and Miguel Tejada.

Thus McGwire's overdue admission arrives to a reception of skepticism and shrugs, like another career criminal describing a religious epiphany to a parole board. Maybe McGwire is sincere, but like Rose, he's waited way too long to expect trust.

He's not going to be able to win that back in an orchestrated media blitz or through the sympathetic statements of enablers like Tony La Russa. He may never be able to repair the reputation he ruined on March 17, 2005, by repeatedly responding to Congressional questions with the Fifth Amendment euphemism, "I'm not here to talk about the past."

Similarly, his Hall of Fame candidacy may be beyond salvaging. In four years on the Baseball Writers ballot, McGwire has yet to achieve more than the 23.7 percent support he received this year. (Induction requires a 75 percent approval rating.)

Once, his induction seemed inevitable. Four years after a strike wiped out the 1994 World Series, McGwire and Sosa reinvigorated baseball with their simultaneous assault on Maris' record. I was among the rapturous witnesses to McGwire's 61st and 62nd home runs that season. Another time, I remember venturing out to the upper deck in Cincinnati to locate the spot where one of McGwire's moonshots landed.

Standing there, I turned toward home plate to discover that the ball had sailed so far that the names on the infielders' backs were now illegible.

I don't want to talk about the past, but my eyes were much better then.

Tim Sullivan writes about sports for The San Diego Union-Tribune.

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